It is referred to as a 419 scam. 519 is the Nigerian criminal code section dealing with theft. In fact there is a novel called "419" by Will Ferguson. a good read and informative about these Nigerian based scams. Check it out if you get a chance.

My son and friends would play these scams back. Make the scammer wear funny clothes, take pictures of himself and a dated paper to confirm the scammers authenticity. Then they would repeat the process just in case. They were messing with some nasty people but they did get pictures.

I thought something was suspicious when he mentioned selling his stuff to pay for his daughters education.

If he really wanted her to get a good life long education he would have told her to start working and filling out loan applications. Thats what I did for both of my college experiences. Mom and pop didn't shell out a dime for me to learn about how life works.

In Canada we have a tax shelter that we could use to put aside money for education. You can put a maximum of $2000/year but the gov't (us tax payer suckers) would top up the fund by a $400/yr grant. So you get an instant 20% return. The catch was that the money could only be used for education. It is a great way for a parent to save for the kids futures. We put 3 kids through university for their first degrees. They did run out of funds by the 4th year and had to work to earn enough to survive. Two are still working and going to school and may finish when they get gray hair. They pay they way fully after tax shelter money ran out. It did take some discipline to set aside the full amount to max the returns.

That was not the case when I went to school. There were nine of us young ones and most of us went to college but we paid full price. Parents were too cash poor to spend it but I suspect they would have found funds if we asked. No one would ask though. We did not waste much and turned lights off when we left a room...etc.

I would not judge the parent's motive for helping. Having a surplus car may be a luxury he thought he could do without for a higher cause.

My wife put a Panasonic PVGS-320 camera up for sale on Craig's list for $300. The buyer said they were in Nevada. He would pay for all the shipping, of course, and asked if he could pay through Pay-Pal. I told my wife to request a US postal money order from him, as I suspected a scam from the begining. He agreed and said he would include $100 for shipping, and could we please ship it to his pastor in Nigeria. Soon after that, my wife received a bogus email stating the money was deposited via US postal money order in an online account, and we had to give our bank info to receive it. My wife was a little niave because she wanted to make a sale, but finally saw the light.

BTW, anyone want to buy a camera? It's still available!